


Tethered

by MoonlightShines (Thatkillervibe)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 11:24:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19084045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thatkillervibe/pseuds/MoonlightShines
Summary: “Tell me something,” Killer Frost repeated. “The day you came to release me from the hospital.”Cisco stared at his lap. Waiting.“How did you do it?”“How did I do it?” he whispered, faintly.





	Tethered

**Author's Note:**

> A reimagined season 3.

“Cisco.” Her cold voice pierced his ears.

He steadied his breathing and closed his eyes for a moment to collect his thoughts. There was so much Cisco was hiding. So many secrets he was keeping from everyone it felt like if he took so much as a wrong turn everything would come spilling out.

And this tone of voice Caitlin was using, this one so new and distorted, and yet, familiar. A call for him across the Cortex, a warning to reel back his sass. It was perfectly crafted to hide her emotion, to pike his intrigue and force him to turn and pay her all his attention, to give her his everything and simply listen to what she had to say. To make him quiet or to make him spill, and it didn’t matter which of the two it was now because everything Cisco now did, every facial expression every word every breath of crisp cold air in his lungs could reveal everything he had packed tighter than snow could ever allow.

Cisco shivered in his apartment, his fleece sweater doing nothing for him. He’s been fiddling with his thermostat for the last three weeks since Caitlin has come to stay here, and still, it did little to help him. He went back up to it now, cranking it up. His breathing came out in puffs of air, crystallizing in front of him.

“Cisco,” she said again. Cisco swallowed.

Caitlin’s hair was stark white, and her complexion paler than death. The eyes that bore into him, however, were a cobalt blue that played in his dreams ever since she haunted them by dying.

Cisco sat carefully next to her on his couch. He rubbed his chapped hands together.

“Tell me something,” she said. And she called herself Killer Frost now, shot him withering looks whenever he called her by name, her beautiful, wonderful name, but now she tilted her head at him, the white curls falling to the side, and she considered her next phrase as his heart lurched in his chest. It was a very Caitlin Snow thing to do.

“Tell me something,” she repeated. “The day you came to release me from the hospital.”

Cisco stared at his lap. Waiting.

“How did you do it?”

“How did I do it?” he whispered, faintly.

 

~.~

 

It was rather simple and 100% accidental to be precise.

Cisco was sitting at home staring at a snapped necklace he had spent hours devoting to guarantee it did it’s damn job when he got the alert.

Cisco had signed up for the program 5 years ago. He wasn’t one to tempt with fate or to sit and look out every window, wistfully sighing over a predestined match. Cisco was never one to surround his life over possibility or chances that did not work in his favour, so, like most people of the 21st century, he left the idea of his goddamn soulmate alone.

But Cisco cared for them anyway. For their health and safety, and overall happiness, wherever they were, whoever they chose to be. The fee to register with the Soulmate Wellbeing Program felt like a justifiable cost to bring closure in his life should they pass away, or to be an extra hand if he were their last hope in affliction. Being his soulmate’s kin without even a face or a name to go with their undisclosed serial number was a little weird, the legal rights they had to his being and vice versa was something he never exactly wanted to be responsible with, nor thought was a great governmental idea when it was legislated after the second world war. That power to use it out of his own want simply if he pleased, to access hospital records and make decisions over their body felt to him like a man’s loophole to revert anything requiring consent.

So when the alert came from the Soulmate Wellbeing Program that Cisco’s soulmate was admitted to Central City’s Centre of Psychiatric Care, prompting him to  _view files_ , he hesitated, glancing at Caitlin’s lost necklace with a sigh of defeat before putting it away and clicking the link.

He read the patient’s admit file and froze. Then immediately grabbed his coat and keys and made a run for the door.

Checking Caitlin out only required an ID check and a signature, but he did stop to ask the nurse at the station how she had been brought in.

“A british man,” the nurse said, seemingly relieved to have been rid of Killer Frost. “With blond hair. He brought her in.”

Cisco narrowed his eyes and clenched the desk, brisk with his thanks. His mind was still reeling with his newfound information, with this missing detail that had been dark in his life for so many years, he could hardly fathom it, and was about to ask another question. But Caitlin was brought to him, blank and dull, a thin firm line pressed against her mouth, but willingly ready to leave with Cisco without snark or question.

“You do not need to be locked up,” he said firmly, breaching her to his apartment later that night. “Caitlin, I know you can hear me. Everything Julian has been telling you are lies. You don’t need to be locked up. You’re not crazy and you don’t need to be fixed.”

“What do I need, then?” Killer Frost said at last, meeting his eyes, and for a fraction of a second Cisco swore he saw the old Caitlin.

 _I don’t know. But I’ll take care of you, always, just as you did with me. Let me love you, Caitlin. Caitlin Snow. My_   _soulmate._

The words bubbled inside under his tongue, threatening to spill from his lips.

Cisco shrugged, and rubbed his arms around himself, freezing as the temperature plummeted.

“Food?”

 

~.~

 

Caitlin looked at her nails, before glancing back at him. Cisco sat very still and forced himself to look back.

“You would only be able to do that if you were immediate family or my…. or my  _soulmate.”_

His breath caught involuntarily, hearing her say _it._  

She kept going, but paused at his behaviour, eyeing him with something that should frighten him, which would frighten him if he were anyone but exactly who she’s accusing him to be.

Caitlin’s mouth dropped open slightly, the most genuine expression Cisco has seen on her face in days. Her eyebrows steadily rose up to meet her white hairline.

The tears flooding Cisco’s eyes were there without his permission, and he swallowed the devastation down that this was how she found out. That after all these years of together, unknowing, blissfully unaware that they were each other’s person. And it was his fault it happened like this, it was his fault for keeping it his dark secret, but how could Cisco sit Killer Frost down and find a way to tell her that wouldn’t utterly cause him to  _break?_  He had imagined every possible scenario, her laughing in his face, her accusing him of making up lies at his desperate attempt to keep her, his imagination playing tricks.

And none of them would be what he knew how Caitlin Snow would react, his soulmate, because this girl in front of him, this maddening literal cold-blooded girl he loved so fiercely even without soulbond knowledge refused to  _be_ her.

Cisco took her hand, flattening her icicled fingers until his own were numb, placing it on his lap. Frost seeped through his thick clothes as he told her, “That’s because…” he worked his jaw open and gave a weak, tearful laugh. “That’s because, Caitlin. You are.”

“No,” she said automatically.

Cisco steeled himself and continued. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. It’s you.”

“No,” she said again, but Cisco’s eyes widened because this was a quiet, pleading no. Killer Frost’s blue lips trembled, and her hand shook in his.

“No,” she choked out, distraught, and her eyes flickered again, this time, Cisco not imagining it. “No,” Caitlin said. “No.”

“It’s true, Caitlin.” He reached for his phone and showed her the app for the program. The one she knew was always on his phone left abandoned.

“Cisco, no,” she whimpered, but colour was returning to her skin and Cisco simply held onto her tightly, letting it sink in. Rose flushed against her cheeks and her irises slowly morphed darker, her lips lighter and lighter until it was the pale pink from her deathbed.

And there is no magic with soulmates. No special feeling that tingles through your toes. No zolt or zap or Einstein theory on souls.

But the knowledge of being soulmated, bound to one person forever by fate cannot be fabricated or recreated or feigned.

It’s a real feeling that settles in your bones. A simple light switch from ignorance to cognizance once unearthed, cannot be stolen.

Cisco’s fingers were close to being frostbitten, and he removed his touch with heartache. He’d never be able to touch her, to kiss her, to take her in his arms like before. Their entire years snatched away with a twisted turn of timelined fate.

But they were scientists who built on numbers and facts and the truth was this was how they were, and always meant to be. And in that same way it meant there was no doubt in Cisco’s mind that this would not end in tragedy.

Caitlin caught him off guard, leaning forward and pressing her lips to his. He shuddered, wondering if this was how he died as he foolishly forgot all caution and wrapped his arms around her neck. It was cold and electrifying but she was not stealing his breath, not in the way that forced frost down his throat, freezing him inside out, and in fact, she folded, melting into his embrace, pushing herself closer as steam hissed between them like a sauna. Cisco opened an eye, and pulled away and so did Caitlin, stunned.

They sat there, breathing heavily, Caitlin gasping, staring at her own hands like they were broken weapons.

“Caitlin,” he said, and this time it’s she who turned and  _listened._ Silver and blue danced back into her eyes and face as the old, temporarily unleashed Caitlin slithered back down into the depths of this new one. Cisco sighed and so did she, shifting away as heat vanished and he shivered again, returning to distanced and cold still as they were the same but something has shifted. “We’re going to make this work.”  

She nodded jerkily and took a deep breath. “Okay.”

Cisco started to ramble, his secrets flooding out like a disintegrating dam. He rubbed his arms up and down his sleeves, trying to gain some warmth. “I haven’t told anybody but Julian might be suspicious what with me cutting him off your whereabouts at the hospital and I still don’t know what to tell Barry or Iris, they still think you’ve disappeared to join Savitar and–”

“Cisco,” Caitlin said. He went quiet, but his eyes danced, couldn’t help it really, not with the way his heart was racing and teeth chattering, so filled with hope. 

“Put up the heat,” she said eventually, meeting Cisco’s gaze with the smallest of smirks. “Wouldn’t want my soulmate to freeze to death.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey if Speed Force is a /thing/ then so is Soulmates. Cased closed.


End file.
